Muck and Magic: A Resilience Lens on Organic Conversions as Transformation

Figures & data

Figure 1. O’Brien and Sygna’s (2013) personal, practical, and political spheres of transformation. The practical sphere represents behaviors and interventions; political sphere represents systems and structures that shape change in the practical sphere; and the personal sphere represents the subjective dimensions that influence behaviors and interventions, and how systems and structures are perceived and experienced. Figure reproduced from O’Brien and Sygna (2013).

Figure 2. Example feedback loop extracted from causal link diagram of participant’s mental model. The balancing feedback loop (B1) illustrates the perceived effects that adaptive organic grazing practices have on the control of agribusiness over the participant’s management of their livestock system. The dotted line represents the participant’s implicit thinking.

Table 1. Changes influencing participant decisions to convert UK farmland from conventional to organic status.

Speed of change	Type and characteristics of change	Experience of change
Abrupt	Volatility of global market dynamics for prices paid for agrichemical inputs and prices offered for farm produce.	Sense of helplessness to manage change effectively on farm.
	Animal disease events, including BSE and foot and mouth.	Stress and despair. Experienced unequally—winners and losers.
	Personal loss and bereavement.	Shock and grief. Unexpected responsibility.
	Anticipated regulation under EU Nitrates Directive.	Fear that decision making related to conventional farming would become further constrained.
Slow	Yield maximizing approach to conventional farming.	Persistent anxiety and stress.
	Privatization of agricultural knowledge and advisory services.	Feelings of unwanted dependence on advice tied to commercial interests of agribusiness organizations.
	Intergenerational succession	Reduced wellbeing through lack of opportunity to spend time with family.

Table 2. Key individual roles and characteristics in shaping capacity for transformation in UK farmer understanding and management of soil fertility.

Role	Characteristics of role
Facilitator	Link learning to current challenges. Build confidence to experiment with novel practices through experiential learning and mutual support outside of learning events. Create unified vision for learning. Act as boundary spanners to cross-scale networks of maverick key individuals.
Maverick	Perceived by followers as thought leaders. Seek and test radical ideas and practices in their localities. Challenge mainstream assumptions, norms, and practices. Inspire and motivate learning through passion and enthusiasm for topic. Demonstrate efficacy of novel practices at local and international scales.

Figure 3. Interplay among O’Brien and Sygna’s (2013) personal, practical, and political spheres of transformation. System changes in political sphere of transformation contradictorily drive, enable, and constrain change across personal, practical, and political spheres of societal transformation. We situate personal and practical spheres within the political sphere to represent how participants articulated their transformations in understanding and management, across personal and practical spheres respectively, interact with changes across the political sphere.

O’Brien, K., and L. Sygna. 2013. Responding to climate change: The three spheres of transformation. In Proceedings of transformation in a changing climate, 19–21 June 2013, 16–23. Oslo: University of Oslo.

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